The winter storm that has paralyzed the East skirted southwestern New York. We've had maybe three or four inches of snow, but that's going to be it. Snow. Wind. School closings and the like—we're used to it. Nothing out of the ordinary.

The NBC affiliate in Buffalo, WGRZ, began its 6 p.m. newscast with an anchor's voice-over saying the station was going to report on the regional weather from a proper western New York perspective. Then the newscast began with a montage of five, maybe six, reporters, all standing outside in bright red parkas. Each of them reported from a different location about the not-terribly-significant weather. In fact, except for the sports, which aired at 6:20, the entire newscast was about the weather.

It's been a long time since I've seen so many reporters trying to squeeze news out of a non-story. The roads are bad, so they'd ask a sheriff's deputies if drivers are sliding off the road. The roads need plowing, so they'd ask a highway superintendent how the roads are being plowed. Then other reporters would ask the same things of the same kind of officials at a location about 15 miles away. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say to stay at home because of the bad roads, I'd be writing this from Maui.

For comparison, when the NBC Nightly News came on at 6:30, only four reporters were covering the story, and they were spread over an area a lot larger than a corner of western New York. And NBC didn't devote its entire newscast to the storm story.

Yep: WGRZ kept the story in perspective, all right. And I am a Nigerian businessman who wants to give you $9 million.

Much of what fell here at first was wet, and it froze on the tops of the larch trees and pines up near the intersection of Windfall and Dugan. Pretty. But I don't think we got even 4 inches—and what came down overnight was very light and fluffy.

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